In the Shadow of the Flame

These three journeys take theater critic Margaret Croyden to a Polish forest retreat devised by experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski, through intensive sessions at a Catskills ashram with Hindu guru Baba Muktananda, and, finally, to a spiritual teacher in an Israel divided by both the metaphor and the reality of war. Each experience, powerfully evoked, arouses memories of Croyden's past - her long forgotten childhood with her Jewish family in Brooklyn, her youthful dreams and aspirations, and her adult search for fulfillment and spiritual transendence. Each experience brings her closer to her identity as a woman, a Jew, and a writer. Croyden's quest turns up no easy answers, no doctrinaire catharses. The struggle for self-knowledge is slow and painful, requiring both a remembering and a forgetting. Croyden's perceptions may sometimes shock - especially those of the relationship between sexuality and religious ecstasy and of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This memoir - moving, thought-provoking, and daringly honest - tells a brave tale of a modern woman's discovery of her authentic self.